Image Source: Brassai, Circa1946 Source: Letaobloquista

Photo Credit: Crowd By Misha Gordin Source: Fallowstore

One of the Crowd

Hauling One rough beam after another Head down Looking neither Right Or Left

Hearing the scrape of worn shoes Hearing the effort in ragged breath

But seeing nothing

Moving together Compliant Silent Complicit

Building a pyre To end the world.

Image: Fish inside a jellyfish Source: Sixpenceee

HAIKU- Ocean Predicament

A fish’s worst dream To be dissolving away In a jellyfish.

-Skye

Artist: Elizaveta Repko (Lizave) Source Malefica67

High Contrast

I want you in high contrast In sharp lines

Don’t Blur or blend Don’t complicate this Afternoon

I want you

Later you can Be obtuse With messy mascara And vague regrets

Later when you return To him.

-Skye

Pysanky - Ukrainian Easter eggs - photographed in 1981.

Preparing for Easter

I wonder who thought of this to take an egg and blow its guts out

To pass the yolk and white into a bowl discards for morning scramble or cheese omelet

Then with wax and fine brushes decorate with exquisite patience an empty shell

Image Source: leben-bleibt-wirr

Seeping Through

Parts of me The form and shape Of things

Once lost emerge

The soft belly exposed One arm coming free

Fleshy plaster Flakes and crumbles

You my dear, Are disgusted

The plaster on the floor The dust on my mouth The damp spreading stain Coating your fingers.

-Skye

Image source: Personal work inspired by the Vastra-Haran housed in the National Museum New Delhi

River Bathing

Bathing women are both vulnerable and dangerous Clothes undefended on the shore Bodies unfurling among the reeds.

This is Wyoming 

The barbed fence undulates into the horizon The long rollers of the deep old sea feathered with grass Dotted with pronghorn and ghosts of buffalo

Capped in bright sky

The great plain The red car zipping Through the simmering tar

The woman almost 50 The woman bright and lively after 70

Talk rolls back and forth

Some thunder

There have always been hard lines Etched in old oceans There has always been wind cutting across the plane Changing everything

 -Skye’s Poem

Saturday Afternoon

I would peel you apples just to see fall’s crisp juice color your lips.

You are so far from me

though

that I wield the knife mutilating the fruit

and bury Eve’s sin deep beneath pastry.

Perhaps the smell of it cooling on the window sill will bring you here

and I will yet taste your mouth

and know everything.                  -Skye

The girl cutting apple, 1938, Andre Derain

Artist: Laura Berger Source: Virtual Art Curator

Stout Women

Hold each other up A collective of acrobats

Balancing upon each other So, no one will

Fall.

-Skye

Source: visualstatic101

Tides

Mooring lost Battered upon the sharp reef I could only be counted as flotsam A bottle with no message Driven out into a howling sea Without a cry

Stranded in this bottle I lost the sea Peering out through the wavy glass I saw nothing I felt nothing So fearful was the loss

The bottle has long broken There are bits of sea glass That can’t cut anyone Even me Scattered now Among my bones

You ask me to examine them now These old hurts and betrayals I see only soft light The kind you find both at dawn and sunset

We are all subject to the tide I suppose, It steals our voice and brings it back again.

-Skye